Serious question. I know there are a lot of memes about microservices, both advocating and against it. And jokes from devs who go and turn monoliths into microservices and then back again. For my line of work it isn't all that relevant, but a discussion I heard today made me wonder.
There were two camps in this discussion. One side said microservices are the future, all big companies are moving towards it, the entire industry is moving towards it. In their view, if it wasn't Mach architecture, it wasn't valid software. In their world both software they made themselves and software bought or licensed (SaaS) externally should be all microservices, api first, cloud-native and headless. The other camp said it was foolish to think this is actually what's happening in the industry and depending on where you look microservices are actually abandoned instead of moving towards. By demanding all software to be like this you are limiting what there is on offer. Furthermore the total cost of operation would be higher and connecting everything together in a coherent way is a nightmare. Instead of gaining flexibility, one can actually lose flexibility because changing interfaces could be very hard or even impossible with software not fully under your own control. They argued a lot of the benefits are only slight or even nonexistent and not required in the current age of day.
They asked what I thought and I had to confess I didn't really have an answer for them. I don't know what the industry is doing and I think whether or not to use microservices is highly dependent on the situation. I don't know if there is a universal answer.
Do you guys have any good thoughts on this? Are microservices the future, or just a fad which needs to be forgotten ASAP.
I have the unpopular user's opinion that I expect transparency in my connections and interactions. I won't use any commercial websites that have ambiguous connections on a whitelist firewall. I expect all businesses to operate like a brick and mortar store in real life. If I enter a grocery store, I'm not entering a bank, a bookstore, and a restaurant to purchase an apple, nor am I selling or giving up any part of my autonomy in my quest to satisfy my fundamental needs.
Personally, in my opinion alone, I view any business that is not transparent and straight forward about who and what I am dealing with as illegitimate and untrustworthy. I view it like inviting someone to a house party that then goes to the bathroom, opens the window, and lets other people enter my home. Or like a retail store that adds a bunch of hidden fees to their products because of something like various distributor logistics costs; stuff that belongs in the back office accounting of running a legitimate business. To me, the practice feels wrong because the default state of the internet being theft of individual autonomy with no freedom of information from determinism. I must assume that everyone is stalkerware, so I must be selective about who I enable in such a system. Micro services remove all accountability and make the problem of digital autonomy exponentially worse in the cases where they are exposed to the end user (data).